radio & multimedia producer

living through nothing

Lyrical writing, according to Wikipedia, is ‘a subgenre of essay writing, which combines qualities of poetry, essay, memoir, and research writing.’

This is my attempt at lyric writing… It’s about being under.

Abigail, do you like cherry pie? How about cherry ice cream…cherry jell-o…cherry cake…cherrrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…………..

Laughing. And then a woman, who smiles and places a wet cloth over my eyes and turns the yellow room black.

Flash. A cool hand on my soft pigtail. I can feel how soft it is, how blond. I eat a popsicle. Later I throw it up. It wasn’t cherry.

Even later I see the picture and now I don’t know if I remember being in that bed or if I just remember what the picture shows me.

I definitely don’t remember being under.

My dad had a dream that he woke up and saw them operating. I wonder if it was really a dream.

They get paid the more than the surgeons, because their art is even more dangerous. Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s because they perform the most precious of tasks, they remove our pain. They inject us with numbness.

Before ether they had alcohol. I’ve felt my nose go numb from drunkeness. But they weren’t cutting into the nose. My favorite podcast said they put the the operating room on the top floor so the screams would escape into the sky. I wonder if they did it at night. I wonder if those people could ever sleep again.

Nothing. Have you ever felt nothing before? It feels like flying. Actually, no it doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like anything, x=but maybe I associate that with flying.

In science fiction future movies they do it to sleep. Their veins don’t fill with blood any longer. It’s regulated.

How funny that many of us fear needles and knives when the most dangerous part is nothing.

Once I spent the night at my grandmother’s house. My sister slept on the small twin bed and I slept on a cot on the floor. My dad’s cot from boy scouts. I went to sleep and awoke in almost the same instance, but now it was morning. Now there was light in the room when only a moment ago I could see the north star out the corner of the window. A flash. No dreams. I felt tired.

That’s what its like, like falling asleep and waking up at the same instant. No dreams. I’m sure they’ve done research. Shown a flat line on a piece of paper at a conference. But it doesn’t feel like a line–more like a dot. A shot. A flash, but if a flash were in negative and the light was sinking darkness for moment.